Walkability Means What, To Whom?:Difficulties and Challenges in Defining Walkability

There has been considerable growth in public health research investigating the influence of the built environment on physical activity. Simultaneously, transport and planning professionals have been promoting a change from inactive to active transport modes to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution. A core concept in both areas of research is ‘walkability’. Walkable areas are varied and professional opinion on the level of walkability of an area can be contradictory. This study used a researcher-developed questionnaire to assess the environmental factors that influence walking behaviour. Professionals working within the areas of planning, architecture, politics, advocacy, public health and engineering were invited to complete the online questionnaire. All professions agreed that the presence of local quality functional walking routes, the availability of numerous destinations within walking distance and the perception of safety were all key factors that influence the walkability of an area. However, professions disagreed on the role of aesthetic factors; visual interest along a route was given a higher priority by some professions than others. It was concluded that different professions have different understandings of the concept of walkability, and future research should employ qualitative methodologies to investigate these differences further

Rethinking zoning for people: Utilizing the concept of the village

In this chapter, we propose it is time to re-think and re-imagine how we approach zoning. This is especially true for suburban developments. Today, especially in the United States, zoning in suburban areas is being used to segregate and separate the component parts of our communities into distinct zones which are spread out geographically and in most cases require the daily use of an automobile. The negative consequences of this form of development for health, community and the environment are discussed. Using a study of neighborhoods in Dublin, Ireland and its suburbs we examine how professionals and the public view the places they live and connect these perspectives to the manner in which zoning has changed over the course of the twentieth century. Insights from these professionals and the public lead us to propose that planners, engineers and developers be expected to think more about the kinds of walkable village neighborhoods that people seem to be drawn to almost instinctively. We urge that zoning laws be re-purposed to enable the building of communities that people prefer to live in

SMPL-Based 3D Pedestrian Pose Prediction

Modeling human motion is a long-standing problem in computer vision. The rapid development of deep learning technologies for computer vision problems resulted in increased attention in the area of pose prediction due to its vital role in a multitude of applications, for example, behavior analysis, autonomous vehicles, and visual surveillance. In 3D pedestrian pose prediction, joint-rotation-based pose representation is extensively used due to the unconstrained degree of freedom for each joint and its ability to regress the 3D statistical wireframe. However, all the existing joint-rotation-based pose prediction approaches ignore the centrality of the distinct pose parameter components and are consequently prone to suffer from error accumulation along the kinematic chain, which results in unnatural human poses. In joint-rotation-based pose prediction, Skinned Multi-Person Linear (SMPL) parameters are widely used to represent pedestrian pose. In this work, a novel SMPL-based pose prediction network is proposed to address the centrality of each SMPL component by distributing the network weights among them. Furthermore, to constrain the network to generate only plausible human poses, an adversarial training approach is employed. The effectiveness of the proposed network is evaluated using the PedX and BEHAVE datasets. The proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with improved prediction accuracy and generates plausible human pose predictions

Identifying High and Low Walkable Neighbourhoods Using Multi-disciplinary Walkability Criteria

Neighbourhood features contributing to the walkability (pedestrian friendliness) of a neighbourhood are diverse and depend on both its physical and social attributes. Earlier work in the Cleaner, Greener, Leaner (CGL) Study identified differences in opinion between professional stakeholder groups (planners, designers, engineers, public representatives, and public health and advocacy professionals) on what constitutes a walkable environment [1]. This diversity has implications for neighbourhood design and planning policy. The findings of a multi-disciplinary focus group study were used to generate a list of walkability criteria to select areas for a population study. In this study twenty areas were shortlisted and grouped under four categories: high walkable deprived, high walkable not deprived, low walkable deprived and low walkable not deprived. This paper presents the process undertaken to identify the study sites. International walkability research has favoured macro-scale objective geographic information systems (GIS) information to identify study areas [2]. While these macro scale attributes are important for walkability, alone they were considered insufficient for site selection by the CGL team as street characteristics were not considered and the attributes had a bias towards transportation walking. Also, indications from the focus group participants were that walkability is perceptual and therefore some resulting criteria were subjective, for example ‘a pleasant atmosphere contextual to area characteristics’ and therefore difficult to measure objectively. The CGL site selection process presented a number of challenges including limitations with available GIS information, unrepresentative neighbourhood boundaries on GIS datasets, and only one deprived neighbourhood identified as high walkable by the focus group participants. An investigation of the role of high and low walkable environments on resident’s behaviours and health can be used to inform future planning, transport, public health and neighbourhood design policies

Fairness and Inclusion for Users of Surface Transport—An Exploratory Thematic Study for Irish Users

This paper explores the conditions of public transport with respect to user accessibility, design of infrastructure, and safety from a gendered perspective. Our investigation aims to understand the factors that direct a citizen’s choice of whether or not to use public transport. Our discussion is focused on gender disparities among user experiences, so we confine our focus to that of women’s perspectives and their experiences with public transport use. A framework for our discussion was formed with consideration of the theoretical aspects of fairness, justice, and gender in transport, as well as user statistics. We identified several spaces where public transport policy planning and implementation may be improved in order to balance gender disparity of access, safety, and security across the gender divide. (We acknowledge that both distinct and interchangeable definitions of safety and security exist. In this work, we err to the latter, while also recognising from user-based qualitative data that safety concerns are not limited to infrastructure, but also relate to other unwanted sources of physical, mental, or emotional harm experienced within the transport system.) Primary among these was the necessity of both the acknowledgment and appreciation of the issues disproportionately experienced by women. A one-size-fits-all approach was found to ill-recognise the societal minutiae of constant caring responsibilities, income limitations, ability/disability, or the effects of past negative experiences faced by women. We conclude that improvements may be achieved by targeting and meeting actual, not just perceived need

An Exploration of Fairness in the Assessment and Process of Student Group Work

This project was driven by a motivation to be as fair as possible in the assessment of students\u27 group work. Achieving fairness in assessment is a recurrent them in group project assessment literature (Nordberg, 2009). All authors of this report teach modules with group projects, and acknowledged that discrepancies often exist between a mark assigned to a group and an individual\u27s contribution. Our aims were to (a) collectively enhance our understanding of the issues that need to be considered when assessing a group work project and (b) collectively build our confidence in approaches chosen to overcome these challenges. The findings of a literature review on group work assessment informed the creation of a methodology to develop a toolkit which can be referred to when planning and setting group work assignments. An intermediary stage of this process was the development of an algorithm which incorporated user perspectives to assign associated values to assignment outputs and how they are assessed. This subjective user input, whether it is generated within a School, a subject matter or from a large sample of educators, can then be applied by associated users. An intended output of these potential processes is that the tailored toolkits can assist educators and/or programmes regardless of their teaching philosophy. Flash-cards were developed as a prototype of how the toolkit information can be visualised

DLR Covid-19 Mobility Review: Evaluation and Review of the Phase 1 Covid-19 Mobility and Public Realm Works undertaken by Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council

Evaluation and Review of the Phase 1 Covid-19 Mobility and Public Realm Works undertaken by Dún Laoghaire- Rathdown County Council. Interim findings, June 2021

Walkable Neighborhoods: Linkages Between Place, Health, and Happiness in Younger and Older Adults

Problem, research strategy, and findings: We examined whether living in a walkable neighborhood influenced the happiness of younger and older city residents. The data for this study came from a comprehensive household population survey of 1,064 adults living in 16 neighborhoods in Dublin City (Ireland) and its suburbs. We used multigroup structural equation modeling to analyze the direct and indirect effects of walkability on happiness, mediated by health, trust, and satisfaction with neighborhood appearance. We found living in a walkable neighborhood was directly linked to the happiness of people aged 36 to 45 (p¼.001) and, to a lesser extent, those aged 18 to 35 (p¼.07). For older adults, we found that walkable places mattered for happiness indirectly. Such built environments enhanced the likelihood that residents felt more healthy and more trusting of others, and this in turn affected the happiness of older people living in walkable neighborhoods. Takeaway for practice: We found that the way neighborhoods are planned and maintained mattered for happiness, health, and trust. Our findings suggest that mixed-use neighborhood designs that enable residents to shop and socialize within walking distance to their homes have direct and indirect effects on happiness. We call for an ongoing dialogue and evaluation of the way our urban and suburban neighborhoods are planned, designed, and developed, so that people can live in walkable places that better enable health and wellbeing

Using Bluetooth Low Energy devices to monitor visitor activity in remote amenity spaces

Tracking of pedestrian behaviour, particularly route selection and temporal behaviours, can be difficult to undertake. This is especially true of studies at a community or campus level where the anonymity of pedestrians can be difficult to protect. The introduction of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations 2016 (GDPR) has increased the complexity of this challenge. Advances in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology in recent years have increased the potential to monitor human behaviour by tracking and triangulating pedestrians. This paper describes an experiment undertaken along The Great South Wall at the Port of Dublin, which is considered a leading amenity location. Monitoring of visitor behaviour in places of this type can provide valuable information about the use of this and other public resources. The aims of this study were to test two prototypes to: i) determine the direction of participants carrying BLE devices, ii) determine the capabilities of two BLE scanning prototypes, (ESP32 & Raspberry Pi3), iii) test the ability of detecting a small number of BLE devices simultaneously while minimising interference or loss of passers-by data, iv) to investigate the use of a hash encoding scheme to anonymise BLE device identifiers. The findings show that the direction of the visitors to the pier can be detected by correlating the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) from multiple Bluetooth scanning devices and this can work where scanning devices are as close as 10m apart. The locations of the BLE scanners has a slight effect on detecting the RSSI from different distances and the distance between scanners needs to be considered to facilitate accurate measurement of direction. As a pier like the South Wall has only one entrance and exit point, this approach can also be used to determine the length of time spent on the pier. The technical performance of the two BLE scanners was also reviewed and the ESP32 was shown to have significantly lower power consumption with only a slight decrease in performance. Finally, it was shown that the BLE scanners can detect multiple carried BLE devices successfully without interference or loss of data as long as those devices are within range of the BLE scanners

Capturing the Behaviour of Volunteer Pedestrians in a Newly-Developed University Campus Using a Distributed Array of Bluetooth Low Energy Devices

Contemporary public infrastructure projects emphasise sustainable options that integrate pedestrian routes, leisure facilities and convenient access to public transport systems. It is important to understand the effectiveness of these contemporary designs. In the age of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), there is a need to develop technologybased solutions that collect information about the behaviour of pedestrians in public spaces as they commute and engage in leisure pursuits while simultaneously preserving the privacy of these citizens. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), has privacypreserving features that make it worth considering as part of a technology solution for studies of this type. This work presents the preliminary results of a multi-stakeholder study that collected data via BLE from 28 volunteer pedestrians who regularly used the public domain of the newly developed Grangegorman campus in Dublin’s north inner city. Before the commencement of the data collection, each volunteer completed a short questionnaire about their intended movements on the campus, and for the next three weeks, they each carried a small keyring-sized BLE beacon with them as they passed through the campus. Bluetooth received signal strength indication from these beacons was collected at 17 points around the campus over the study period. The data for the volunteers were anonymised at the point of capture by hash encoding the MAC address of the beacons. The results of the work show that BLE can be used to monitor the approximate movements of volunteer pedestrians and so provide valuable privacy-preserving data on the utilisation of public infrastructure